Veni, Vidi, Vicious

HBO's Rome is refreshingly amoral.

by Sarah Hepola

September 6, 2005

Those Romans sure knew how to party. By the end of the sixth episode of this lavish HBO drama, there’s been more fucking, drinking, and violence than a Gotti family orgy. "Rome was a time of different morals," creator Bruno Heller states in the sober making-of documentary. What that means, basically, is a lot of doggy-style, random blood-letting, and a gory animal sacrifice that makes the prom scene in Carrie look like, well, just another prom. This is still a sophisticated adult drama — a well-oiled premium cable machine of expert acting, compelling camerawork, and exquisite detail, with the added bonus of those crisp English accents. (I don’t know why Romans always speak with English accents, but you have to admit, it does make them seem smarter.) But this is no stiff Merchant-Ivory costume drama; HBO serves up this period piece with equal parts brutality and debauch.
    The story follows the split between Pompey and Julius Caesar that turned Rome from a republic ruled by senators into Caesar’s great empire. For those rusty on ancient history, this can all be a little baffling — tribunes, auguries, blah blah blah — but creator Bruno Heller has the common sense to tell these epic tales through the lives of his characters. Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd), a soldier, has been fighting with Caesar’s army for eight years in Gaul (a.k.a. France). He’s a stoic and deeply moral man — something increasingly rare these days in Rome—who returns home to find his wife a stranger, his home more fraught with conflict than the battlefield. His fellow soldier, Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson), is his polar opposite: loud, libertine, a bear of a man with a soft spot for women and wine. Then there are all those characters from Shakespeare — noble Caesar (Ciaran Hinds), young Brutus (Tobias Menzes), and vicious, philandering Mark Antony (James Purefoy) — plus a gaggle of well-spoken senators wearing togas. The show’s most dynamic character, rather surprisingly, is a woman — Caesar’s niece, Atia of the Julii, played by Polly Walker with a magnificent, raw-meat hunger usually reserved for BBC performances of Medea. A single mother of two, Atia is a woman unabashedly angling for power and prosperity. She sleeps with random men, lies often and well, thrusts her reluctant children out into the world to toughen them up. When her strange, cerebral son Octavian (Max Pirkis) tries to duck out of an appointment with a prostitute, Atia utters perhaps the strangest words yet written for a primetime mother: "You will penetrate someone today, or I will burn your wretched books in the yard!"
    As foreign as that kind of pre-Christian morality might seem today, there are still parallels to be made between our embattled country and the doomed, bloated empire portrayed here—rife with class warfare, choking on its own privilege, squandering men and money on pointless foreign wars. But thinly veiled critiques of a troubled administration are better left to The West Wing and Law & Order. Instead, Rome is interesting because it doesn't make facile moral decisions about its characters. None of these people is innocent. The show reveals one profound deception after another, each of which threatens to rend a life apart. "Every city has its secrets," goes the show’s tagline, and those secrets flow as freely down the cobbled streets as blood. Because the drama depends on their gradual reveal, it’s a bit of a slow burn. It takes time to understand what is at stake for these characters — what they’re hiding, what they’re longing for — and though the first episode is underwhelming, by the fifth, I was hooked.
    Rome will be a hard sell for an American viewing audience. Despite all the graphic nudity and violence, it can be a bit cold at times, and it’s unafraid to confound its audience: Why are the thieves in the first episode covered in blue powder? Why is there a giant topless woman covered in blood in episode six? And what, exactly, is going on with Caesar and Pompey? But it’s a wildly ambitious, welcome undertaking for a cable channel (reports have tabulated the cost at upwards of $100 million, making it the most expensive series ever). Even though we know what history ultimately holds for these characters, there’s delicious dramatic irony and tension in discovering their paths. Then again, I shouldn’t overestimate the audience, many of whom have probably abandoned the history of ancient Rome along with their braces. In which case, I won’t tell you how it ends.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Sarah Hepola has been a high-school teacher, a playwright, a film critic, a music editor and a travel columnist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, Salon, and on NPR. She lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.